Then the whole town went out to meet Jesus. And when they saw him, they pleaded with him to leave their region. – Matthew 8:34

Today’s Scripture Reading (August 22, 2014): Matthew 8

There is a struggle in the church regarding the movement of God. For some, there is no expectation that God is capable of doing anything. In fact, it is less than an expectation. It is a fervent hope that God will not move in our midst. One reason is that God moving is weird. It is okay if God is our servant and does precisely what it is that we want him to do, but we know that the reality is that God seldom limits himself to precisely what it is that we want. The contemporary church simply works too hard at not being weird to let God spoil the agenda.

There is another section of the church that seems to want to serve a God who is weird on steroids. They want to magnify the weirdness not only of God but of the church. If it is not weird, then it cannot be God. For this section it seems that God is designed expressly for an episode of the Twilight Zone or of the Outer Limits.

But the problem on both sides of the story is that God seldom follows our agendas, whatever they might be. God simply is. And ultimately God defines this world the way that he wants to define it and does whatever pleases him. But, to our understanding, there are questions throughout this story with regard to Jesus. Among the first of these questions is the why’s surrounding the events. Why were the men tormented with demons (in our modern culture we would be more likely to assess the situation as having to do with mental Illness)? And why did Jesus allow the demons to go into the pigs – killing the pigs. To be honest the whole story seems – well, weird.

But I was reminded recently that the story also stresses three truths. These truths have to do with the spirit world that we sometimes struggle even believing really exists. The first is that the men had a demonic problem, and not a mental one. Once whatever was inside of them was cast out, the men returned to a more normal state of mind, and whatever was cast out did not make the animals neurotic and paranoid – it did not fill the pigs with a mental disorder – rather, it filled them with a violence that until now had been evident in the men. The first truth that is reflected by the story is that the demonic world would seem to have a real impact on our physical world. (However, a note of caution. Too often we begin to think that all mental illness is demonic possession – it is not. And we need doctors and mental health professionals to help us with mental issues, and we need to work hard to remove the stigma attached to mental issues. But in this case, the underlying cause of the mental issue was demonic in nature.)

The second thing we need to note is that Jesus very definitely had power over the demons. They did whatever it was that Jesus commanded them to do. And the people did not like it. They wanted Jesus to go away – to not be a part of the things that they did. With everything that God could do, all they wanted him to do was leave.

We would never say it, but I think we often feel the same. We don’t want God to cast out our demons, we actually have grown to like them. Jesus is okay as long as he stays powerless. A powerful God is dangerous and weird, and we don’t want him around – even if all he wants is to change our lives for the better.    

Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Luke 7